Mike Steenson
In Smartmatic USA Corp. v. Lindell,[1] Smartmatic sued Michael Lindell and MyPillow, Inc. in Minnesota federal district court, alleging defamation and violation of Minnesota’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act based on Lindell’s claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including that Smartmatic voting machines were rigged. This post focuses on Smartmatic’s defamation claim against Lindell and MyPillow.
Continue reading “MyPillow Lands Hard in Judge Wright’s Court”
All told, outside of a small number of narrowly defined exceptions, speech by students, staff, and faculty is protected against reprisal by public universities. In each of the examples above, the speech was at least partially—if not fully—protected by the First Amendment (although some of the speech uttered by students might not have been protected if it had been said by faculty or staff). Public universities can achieve essential societal values of equality, diversity, and inclusivity and promote civility in discourse while also respecting the dictates of the First Amendment. Universities have tremendous institutional academic freedom to set curricula, build programming, engage in out-of-class educational opportunities, and determine whom they will hire and admit. Public universities need to promote essential societal values in ways that guarantee they are not engaging in viewpoint discrimination or compelling expression of ideological beliefs, ensuring these institutions are held accountable constitutionally and do not impose punishments that fall disproportionately on groups that have been traditionally, and continue to be, marginalized.
Continue reading “Free Speech, Social Media, and Public Universities: How the First Amendment Limits University Sanctions for Online Expression and Empowers Students, Staff, and Faculty”“Revenge porn,” otherwise known as the dissemination of nonconsensual pornography, is the sharing of images or videos that portray a person engaged in an intimate or sexually explicit act without that person’s consent. Although the term “revenge porn” would seem to only entail sexually explicit content distributed with reprisal, its scope encompasses a variety of personal content obtained with or without consent, such as intimate images or videos privately shared with another in the context of a relationship or unshared content obtained by hackers.
Continue reading “Minnesota Revenge Porn Law: A Look at the State v. Casillas Decisions”Imagine a scenario in which a city is in unrest; a man has been killed at the hands of police officers, so protestors have been filling the streets for days, demanding change. In the midst of a protest, a semi-truck enters a closed road and barrels through thousands of protestors. The driver is taken into custody. Law enforcement officers hold an impromptu press conference to inform the city, although the conference is closed to the public because of a global pandemic. In the press conference, the officers state that a man has been taken into custody for swerving into the crowds, and he has ties to a right-wing extremist group; however, the investigation is ongoing. The media promptly reports on these official statements to amplify this relevant government investigation to the public. Once the man is released from custody, he wants to sue the media for defamation—he is not a member of a right-wing extremist group, and the collision was an accident. Should the media be liable for reporting the officials’ defamatory statements, especially those of public concern? Before the Minnesota Supreme Court extended the fair and accurate reporting privilege to cover official news conferences in Larson v. Gannett Co., media organizations could have been liable just for republishing the officers’ defamatory statements.
Continue reading “Torts: Sacrificing Individual Recovery for Media Protection–Larson v. Gannett Co., 940 N.W.2d 120 (Minn. 2020)”The violence of lynching is a blot on our nation’s history that continues to threaten the rule of law in analogous ways today. The May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee-hold of a Minneapolis police officer attests to this. As we interrogate this fiercely racist act of police brutality, and the many preceding it, various lenses can be employed to derive new meanings. James H. Cone, one of the fathers of Black Theology, provides us with an interpretation that we might overlook: the Black Jesus who dies on the cross to overcome the violence experienced by Blacks. As he wrote in his last work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “to understand what the cross means in America, we need to take a look at the lynching tree in this nation’s history.”
Continue reading “The Lynching of George Floyd: Black Theology, Protest, and Racial Justice”In recent years, the tension between the values of the First Amendment Free Speech doctrine and the desire to protect minority communities against the destructive effects of hateful speech has been investigated extensively. A recent example is the compelling discussion provided by Professor Nadine Strossen in her 2018 book, Hate Speech: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her book was one of the focal points of a 2019 conference on free speech at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Another focal point was the Supreme Court’s landmark 1931 decision, Near v. Minnesota. In this decision, the Supreme Court established the now-familiar rule against prior restraints, thereby invalidating an infamous injunction issued against a Minneapolis newspaper ninety years before the date of the conference.
Continue reading “Antisemitism, Near, and a Threshold for Ignominy”“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins” is an axiom not always, but often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Whichever learned individual penned it, the quotation exemplifies the omnipresent and judicially confounding tension between “freedom of” and “freedom from” speech and expression.
In reviewing In re Welfare of A.J.B., the Minnesota Supreme Court invalidated Minnesota’s stalking-by-mail statute and narrowed the mail-harassment statute. Under the first statute, stalking-by-mail occurs when a person “repeatedly mails or delivers or causes the delivery by any means, including electronically, of letters, telegrams, messages, packages” and “the actor knows or has reason to know [this conduct] would cause the victim under the circumstances to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated.” Pursuant to the second statute, mail harassment occurs when an actor “with the intent to abuse, disturb, or cause distress, repeatedly mails or delivers or causes the delivery by any means, including electronically, of letters, telegrams, or packages.”
Continue reading “The Elasticity of Protected Speech: A Balance of Breadth”Social media has opened a whole new world of opportunity for government officials to communicate with citizens and receive feedback in a timely and cost-effective manner. Gone are the days where local officials personally connected with constituents only through pounding the pavement, running county fair booths, and hosting town hall meetings. When and how they use social media sites for official versus private purposes has created a technology-led evolution in First Amendment jurisprudence, but this evolution is one that is providing slow and confusing legal guidance to elected leaders. At the same time, online applications and new social media platforms are being launched at breakneck speeds. This Article will describe the public forum and government speech doctrines, provide an analysis of internet based communications using these First Amendment principles, and discuss blocking and comment deletions in the context of recent court decisions involving government officials on social media.
Continue reading “Technological Transformation of the Public Square: Government Officials Use of Social Media and The First Amendment”Under the First Amendment, “[t]he method for protecting freedom of worship and freedom of conscience in religious matters is quite the reverse” of that used to protect general freedom of speech. Unlike with speech, the government generally does not participate in religious dialogue or debate, as “the Framers deemed religious establishment antithetical to the freedom of all.” Where the Free Exercise Clause embraces freedom of conscience and worship parallel to the speech provisions of the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause specifically prohibits “state intervention in religious affairs.” Yet courts have long recognized that “there is room for play in the joints” between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.
Continue reading “Fundamental Funds: Tax Credits and the Increasing Tension between the Free Exercise Clause and Establishment Clause—Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 140 S. Ct. 2246 (2020)”Carly Johnson is an Articles Editor for Volume 47 of the Mitchell Hamline Law Review and a third-year law student at Mitchell-Hamline School of Law.
Continue reading “New Turf for Lawn Sign Wars: Free Speech and the Limitation on Candidate Lawn Signs”
